Category Archives: Oceans

“A new study published today (Sept. 25) in the journal Science suggests that between 10 to 30 percent of the Earth’s water is older than the sun, and likely hails from comets born outside our solar system. That means that the human body, which is 60 percent water, contains a significant percentage of extraterrestrial aqua; in that sense, we are all part alien.” – Douglas Main, Newsweek

And if it’s true of us, it’s probably true of others. Life elsewhere may take similar forms because water may form its basis, as it does ours.

A study published yesterday in the journal Science suggests oceans of water are locked in rock about 400 miles below Earth’s surface. It’s not liquid, ice or vapor, but rather hydrogen and oxygen embedded in the molecular structure of mineral rock. Researchers think it may help explain some things about how the planet formed, and how oceans gathered on the planet’s surface, which is great. But for many observers the first question is, how do we get at it? And the answer is a flat no, we don’t get anywhere near this stuff, much less turn it into a usable form, because it’s far too deep in the mantle. It’s 400 miles down, and the deepest humans have ever drilled is less than 10 miles.

Imagine that: One moment you’re focusing on the tiny rigging adjustments that may help qualify you for sailing events in the upcoming Rio Olympics, and the next you’re swimming in sewage because your boat hit a submerged sofa that someone threw away.

Olympic sailing hopefuls are reporting that Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, site of the 2016 Summer Olympics’ sailing and windsurfing events, is truly fouled by raw sewage and garbage. One Brazilian athlete says he’s come across four human corpses while sailing on the bay.

Brazil is making major efforts to clean up the site, but many critics fear it’s too little, too late. This is just the latest take on a familiar Olympics story: huge construction costs and delays, allegations of managerial incompetence, corruption, and human rights violations, and a sense of sinking dread over misplaced priorities. But you can’t argue with the TV ratings.

It’s tempting to see desalination as an eventual cure-all for parched places like California — something that is expensive to implement and run because of energy costs, but worth prioritizing someday. Someday, that is, when there is no other way to get enough freshwater. Many countries have turned to it. Unfortunately, cost is not the only reason to put off desalination projects. Their byproducts, or waste, are bad for the environment and difficult to deal with safely. And in California, critics of seawater desalination would add that far more should be done through conservation before turning to drastic measures.

I recently wrote about solar-powered desalination as an alternative to traditional methods that might help California with its record-breaking drought, focusing on WaterFX and its solar distillation of agricultural run-off water for re-use. On Tuesday, The Guardian‘s Oliver Balch picked up on the story in some depth, referring to renewable desalination projects all over the world, but focusing on WaterFX. That prompted a thoughtful article by environmental journalist Chris Clarke for Southern California’s KCET.org. He asked an obvious and very important question: What about all the salt and other stuff we take out of the water?

At the end of any kind of desalination process, you get leftover piles of salt and buckets of super-salty brine. (Use any measurement metaphor you like, appropriate to scale: piles and buckets; hills and lakes; mountains and oceans.) You get a little freshwater and a lot of leftover crap, some potentially useful and some not, and there’s only so much you can do with it. With WaterFX’s solar distillation, you get brine laced with chemicals and solids from the soil, from fertilizers, motor oil and other sources. The company says it can sell the byproducts, but there’s room for skepticism (and leaky landfills standing by). With seawater, desalination projects tend to filter brine back into the ocean, where it dissolves over time. But brine waste, heavier than seawater, can smother sea life on the ocean floor. And, looking ahead, if huge coastal desalination projects continue to spring up all over the world, how much additional salinity can sea life tolerate? Even in the oceans, a little too much salt can kill.

One thing is relatively clear: Powering desalination with renewable energy should bring down long-term energy costs while providing freshwater. But questions and problems remain. In addition to pollution worries, the timing of when to make the big investment can be tricky. As Clarke points out, a large desalination plant opened in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1992 because of a drought. But the drought ended, and the plant just sat there because it was too expensive to run in the absence of a crippling water shortage. After its test runs, it never produced a drop of potable water. Now, the largest desalination plant in the western hemisphere is slated for 2016 completion in Carlsbad, near San Diego, at a cost of $1 billion.

Happiness is not a police state, and unmanned aerial vehicles aren’t just for the war machine anymore. Though many of us associate drones with bomb strikes and government surveillance, their civilian use is growing more widespread and attracting massive investment. It’s going to go far beyond recent headline grabbers (e.g., Domino’s pizza-delivery tests and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos saying on “60 Minutes” that deliveries by drone will be off the ground in 2015, depending on FAA approval). Essentially, anything that calls for a bird’s-eye view, aerial photgraphy, or lightweight deliveries can benefit from drone service. In no particular order, here are five favorites, already underway:

Delivering medicine. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to George Barbastathis and collaborators at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in the U.S. They’re working on unmanned aerial vehicles that health care workers can deploy via cell phones to swiftly deliver vaccines and the like.

3-D mapping for everyone. Using a lightweight drone and powerful new software, almost anyone will soon be able to create precise 3-D maps for any number of uses, such as crop management, facilities monitoring and disaster relief operations. Watch Pix4D co-founder Olivier Kung’s TEDx talk on the subject.

Search-and-rescue. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported what they believed to be the first use of a drone to rescue an accident victim. After a late-night car accident in remote Saskatchewan in May 2013, an injured and disoriented man called police but couldn’t report his location. Worse, he wandered far from the crash site. A helicopter search failed to find the man, even with night-vision gear, but an unmanned drone with an infrared camera did the job. Without it, he would not have survived the night.

A Chinese company and a university research team said Tuesday they will begin desalinating sea ice on a large scale to make freshwater for drinking and use in agriculture and industry, the Xinhua news agency reports.

With technological development, the cost of desalination is falling, which makes this kind of industrial-strength effort more feasible than it used to be. It helps that sea ice has much less salt than seawater: 0.4 to .0.8% versus 2.8 to 3.1%, according to the researchers, who are from Beijing Normal University.

Using newly developed equipment, including machinery to break and gather ice, Beijing Huahaideyuan Technology Co. says it expects annual output of 1 billion cubic meters of freshwater at 0.1% salinity by 2023.

Natural disasters often knock out access to clean water, which can make thirst and disease bigger causes of death than the catastrophe itself. When a massive storm like Typhoon Haiyan strikes a large, densely populated landmass like the Philippines, the risk to health is widespread, ongoing and a huge challenge to large aid organizations.

Shipments of bottled water help, but they’re expensive to execute, they may not reach everyone, and they cause waste. That’s why WaterStep and its small water purifiers make for such a compelling story, as reported by Takepart.com and Fast Company. The Louisville, Kentucky-based nonprofit group sent 60 of its M-100 Chlorinators over to the stricken nation, piggybacked on a flight of volunteer college kids who would act as couriers. The devices would be distributed in remote areas by newly trained nonprofit workers from the Philippines’ second-largest population center, Cebu City, which was spared by Haiyan and has been a staging area for relief operations.

Each device, about the size of a 2-liter soda bottle, with tubes sticking out, can chlorinate about 1,000 gallons (3,785 liters) of water per hour, or 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters) per day, using some table salt and a basic power source, such as a car battery or a solar panel. The byproducts, chlorine and sodium hydroxide, can be mixed to make a saline solution or used separately as disinfectants.

Another technology created for WaterStep bears mentioning, though not necessarily in the context of disaster relief. The group distributes the Water Ball, a durable sphere with handles that can be filled with water and rolled. In many parts of the world with limited access to clean water, women and children are burdened with the task of carrying water great distances daily; the Water Ball is meant to make it easier to carry more water more quickly.

With the At the Waterline blog, I’m writing about water issues as I learn about them. Almost every day, I learn something new. It’s exciting, but it also makes me feel perpetually late to the party. Today I saw that people have been entering “Jorge Viñuales” into the blog’s search box, so I looked him up. That led me to a 13-month-old YouTube video entitled, “A Tax on Bottled Water: Jorge Viñuales at TEDx Zurich.”

In the video, Viñuales, a lawyer and law professor (see credentials below), suggests a small transactional tax on bottled water that would be used “(1) for the protection of the natural infrastructures that maintain the water cycle, i.e. wetlands, (2) for direct local water distribution and sanitation projects (e.g. for the coordination of inter-city projects), and (3) for research on water efficiency, decontamination and alternative techniques (e.g. exploitation of melting iced-water).”

Citing the $50 billion European bottled water market as an example, Viñuales says that a 3% tax could raise $1.5 billion (presumably annually). Viñuales acknowledges that some people think we all should stop drinking bottled water entirely, but he argues that “sermonizing” people is not the best way to effect environmental policy change. As such, he suggests what seems like a more practical step, in order “to link water as a luxury to a real problem … access to water as a human need.”

Whether bleeding bottled-water companies financially would work in practice, and do enough to fund programs to help those in immediate need as well as discover new or more efficient ways to get freshwater, are other questions — ones that a 12-minute TED talk can’t cover in any depth. Viñuales did mention, however, his work on a legal framework to manage freshwater resources trapped in ice (e.g., towing icebergs; extracting freshwater from icebergs is a serious subject of study).

Viñuales is a practicing lawyer, the Harold Samuel Professor of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professor of International Law at The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, during the academic year 2013-2014. Two of Viñuales’ most recent books are Foreign Investment and the Environment in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Harnessing Foreign Investment to Promote Environmental Protection: Incentives and Safeguards (Cambridge University Press, 2013, co-edited with P.-M. Dupuy),

OK, it may not be as glamorous or as self-important as the Academy Awards, aka The Oscars, but the International Desalination Association (IDA) exists and it gives out awards. That’s two new things I learned today.

*(NGO, or non-governmental organization; the abbreviation is used more commonly than the spelled-out version in the development world, e.g., the world of the United Nations and various other regional and international aid organizations.)